Zotero – New and Improved, with Bluebook Citation Formatting!

by: Karen Storin Linitz - August 11th, 2008

Many of us here at HLSL have been longtime fans of Zotero, the free, open source, Firefox extension citation and document management tool. But now there are even more reasons for YOU to get to know Zotero.

For one thing, Zotero downloads and organizes not only your citations, but also full documents and web pages. It lets you tag and save your records and notes in more than 30 languages. Zotero 1.5, which you can preview now, will allow you to back up your data and sync it across multiple computers.

Bonnie Shucha, at WisBlawg, has this excellent post explaining other merits of Zotero, including the fact that Zotero now has a feature (in beta) that provides Bluebook citation formatting. Bonnie calls Zotero “an absolute must have for anyone who writes,” and notes actual “squeals of delight” coming from faculty seeing a demonstration of it. Do read Bonnie’s post for much more info, including a short video tour.

And while you’re downloading Zotero, why not grab the latest Harvard version of LibX? LibX is another “cool tool” Firefox extension (there is also a version for Explorer) that, among other fine features, gives you a one-click reload of fee-based documents found out on the web (such as a JSTOR article) into their Harvard’s licensed e-resource versions, and lets you quickly determine whether any document you come across while surfing is available at Harvard.